Shaun Donovan's focus altered by foreclosures

At a recent forum on the stumbling economy sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan seemed like a diligent student as he dutifully recited how HUD and the Obama administration met the home foreclosure crisis with billions of stimulus dollars, pressure on banks and mortgage modification programs.

But asked a question about housing and income equality, Donovan seemed transformed. Drawing “mmm-hmms” of approval from the mostly African-American audience, he gave an impassioned argument for how the nation must promote affordable rental homes as much as homeownership, how smart housing policy should include programs to lift people from poverty and how, without it, “we really will have class warfare.”

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POLITICO 44

It was a telling commentary on the tenure of the nation’s 15th HUD secretary.

Donovan came to the job as a kind of housing rock star: engineering, architecture and public administration degrees from Harvard; a stint as New York City’s housing czar; a passion for affordable housing; and the power to make it happen.

But Donovan has had little chance to pursue that agenda. Since he took over HUD in April 2009, the nation’s worst housing collapse has morphed from a fast-moving emergency fueled by a subprime-mortgage meltdown into a lingering, solution-resistant catastrophe driven by joblessness and the faltering economy.

“He probably didn’t have [this] in mind” when he signed on to be HUD secretary, said David Min, a housing finance expert at the Center for American Progress, adding, “Is this what he would have dreamed about as his tenure as HUD secretary? Probably not.”

Struggling to keep up with the housing crisis, the Obama administration has rolled out one program after another, most of them centered on dealing with banks, mortgage insurers and finance companies. Though Donovan was “at the table,” according to a White House aide, analysts said the policies came not from HUD but from White House economic advisers and the Treasury Department.

“You’d be hard pressed to find a coherent strategy,” said Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research. “You might have one set of ideas coming from Treasury and another set coming from HUD, and they never meshed and [that conflict] never got resolved, so everything is case by case.”

Baker, like other liberal analysts, questions whether Donovan, the housing expert, has had as much influence over administration policy as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. “I believe Secretary Donovan is at the table, but he is not a full player,” said Sarah Rosen Wartell, a former HUD official now executive vice president of the Center for American Progress, adding that Donovan lacks Geithner’s power to pressure banks on behalf of lenders.

In an interview with POLITICO, Donovan said he believes the steps taken by HUD and the White House slowed foreclosures from a torrent in 2008 to a stream and saved millions of people from homelessness. “If you looked at where the market was: 30 straight months of decline in housing prices, record foreclosures … [and] there was clearly an expectation … of more of the same” if they hadn’t acted, he said.

But he acknowledged “there’s still a long way to go.”

Donovan would not directly respond to questions about whether his role has been diminished, saying only that the “comprehensive” solutions created by the White House and other Cabinet-level departments “have helped keep 5 million people in their homes since April 2009.”

A senior White House economic policy official argued that Donovan, domestic policy chief Melody Barnes and other top aides meet “with great regularity” to discuss housing policy, a complex problem that touches several Cabinet-level agencies beyond HUD and Treasury. “To my mind,” the aide added, “Shaun is probably as significant a player in housing policy … as any [HUD secretary] in history.”

There’s no question the housing crisis Donovan and the White House inherited in 2009 was unprecedented and daunting, centered largely on schemes to bundle home mortgages and resell them as Wall Street securities. But a common critique is that the Obama administration has focused on trying to treat the symptoms of the crisis — foreclosures — while ignoring the underlying causes, including unrepentant banks and homeowners in over their heads, as well as the consequences.

News documents indicate that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder more than likely perjured himself in congressional testimony about Operation Fast and Furious earlier this year.

Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and William LaJeunesse of Fox News have been the only mainstream media reporters diligently working on the most important scandal in White House history, and it is no surprise that they concurrently released information indicating that the attorney general, who claimed in direct testimony on May 3 of this year in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that he first heard about Operation Fast and Furious “over the last few weeks,” had actually been briefed on the program in a memo by the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center almost a year earlier on July 5, 2010.

A copy of the heavily redacted weekly report posted by CBS News offers direct evidence that not only was the attorney general briefed on Operation Fast and Furious, but that he was briefed on it regularly and was well aware that the program was sending thousands of weapons into the hands of the Sinaloa cartel:

To the dismay of consumer groups and the discomfort of Democrats, President Barack Obama wants Congress to make it easier for private debt collectors to call the cellphones of consumers delinquent on student loans and other billions owed the federal government.

The change "is expected to provide substantial increases in collections

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GO BAMA GO! GIT THOSE STUDENTS NOT PAYING LOANS

If the Feds get into the rental game like they did with housing ( Freddie Mac/Fannie May) rentals will be faced with rent controls. Rental monthly rates are more stable than homes prices. Rental units will become the new "foreclosure". Rental unit income will not come close to matching the rental units expenses.

I've been looking to buy a rental to augment my Social Security income. I'm unable to find anything that has a clear title due to the MERS debacle. Maybe this egghead can have the Federal Government guarantee the titles on these questionable properties. I'm surprised that the banks havn't demanded it.